The 80s: when men were men and TV shows were once a week

Hooten and the Lady, an adventure series about a rough-and-ready fortune-hunter and a posh museum curator, begins on Friday (Sky One). It looks like a throwback to an era when television was dominated by charming white hats with big personalities (personality traits might include "sassiness", chewing a cigar or owning a hat). These characters were stunt-men, novelists, fugitives, sexy millionaires or astronauts lost in time. They all solved crimes on the side.

This was before binge-watching, anti-heroes, series-length story-arcs and arty credit sequences, when every second show was created by musical Mormon propagandist Glen A. Larson. Every week’s episode began and ended the same way. You could watch them in any order. The characters learned nothing. The viewers learned nothing. It was brilliant.

The Fall Guy
Colt Seavers (Lee Majors) was a stuntman by day and a bounty hunter by night (like yourself). He had a cool truck, a cousin called Howie who was a bit crap, and no matter what case he was investigating, he managed to shoehorn in some stunting. He might for example rush through a room while on fire to distract some kidnappers, or, for no apparent reason, fall several floors from an upper window onto a mattress below, to distract some other kidnappers. "Stop showing off Colt!" I regularly shouted, but I loved it so much I took up smoking cigars and falling over a lot.

Lee Majors went on to form cult Scouse indie band The Las. No, you're wrong. Lee Majors and Lee Mavers are the same person.

The A-Team
The A-Team were four amiable mercenaries on the lam for a crime they did not commit. Every week they protected sombrero-clutching villagers from trigger-happy yobs. Then the army rolled into town and evil Colonel Decker shook his fist in the air.

Hannibal, their leader, was a cigar-smoking safari-jacketed master-of-disguise and his travelling companions were a preening sex-addict and a bejewelled peacock with anger-management issues. I most related to the wacky pilot, Howling Mad Murdock. This was, by the standards of the time, “a sensitive portrayal of mental illness”. Howling Mad Murdock spoke in funny voices, wore a cool hat and his team-mates would regularly break him out of the mental hospital so he could fly them around in a stolen plane and have adventures.

For some reason, Murdock never got better.

Tough guy BA Baracus, who wore dungarees like a toddler and jewels like the Queen of Sheba, had his own problems. “I ain’t goin in no plane,” he would say regularly. So his friends would knock him unconscious and put him on a plane. Suffice it to say, BA never got over his fear of planes or his tendency to use misleading double negatives.

We know much more about human psychology nowadays and the A-Team’s problems were clearly not helped by Face’s undiagnosed narcissism and Hannibal’s multiple personality disorder. In retrospect, I think the A-Team probably did commit the crime of which they were accused.

Scarecrow and Mrs King
A straw-based vermin-deterrent and the wife of a monarch who banded together to solve crime. Okay, I never quite understood the premise of Scarecrow and Mrs King (she was a housewife and I think he was a gigolo) but I fancied Mrs King (Kate Jackson) so I just went with it.

Magnum PI
I've written about Magnum (Tom Selleck) in previous articles, so it's enough to say that he was a moustachioed, tiny-shorts-wearing bum who lived on the Hawaiian estate of a millionaire author whilst obeying the whims of a large-pantalooned Englishman named Higgins. I'm not sure exactly what Magnum's deal was but I'm assuming he was some sort of "gentleman's companion" who fought crime on the side. He encouraged a generation of impressionable young men into a life of prostitution and gun play.

Knight Rider
In the 1980s a billionaire gave David Hasselhof a talking car with a prissy attitude and told him to fight crime. And thus Glen A Larson predicted the outsourcing of policing to machines built by billionaires.

My favourite episodes were those where a hoodlum would try to break into KITT while Michael Knight (Hasselhof) was at the shops and KITT would drive the hoodlum to the brink of madness with its impenetrability and uncanny behaviour. By giving KITT a waspish Boston Brahmin accent was Glen A Larson trying to make a point about the socioeconomic roots of crime?

The answer is “no.” He was trying to make the point that KITT was a great car and great fun to be around. In later episodes KITT’s nemesis was an evil jalopy with a deep robotic voice. Its name was KARR and it was made by Google. Nowadays when no-one is looking, I call my sat-nav “KITT”.

Murder, She Wrote
Novelist Jessica Fletcher investigated a crime wave which inexplicably followed her from her home town of Cabot Cove along the Eastern coast of the United States. She did so with nothing but her steely intelligence, a withering gaze and a surprising amount of knowledge about murder technique. If Murder, She Wrote had been produced by Wire creator David Simon it would have been a dark analysis of a police system so systemically rotten it had to be bolstered by a middle-aged hobbyist, who should have been, with the benefit of hindsight, a prime suspect. Donegal has nothing on Cabot Cove.

Hart to Hart
Jonathan (Robert Wagner, he's "quite a guy") and Jennifer Hart (Stefanie Powers, "she's goyjus") were a glamorous millionaire couple who solved crimes accompanied by their pet dog Freeway and their adoring working-class manservant Max. In one episode they raced their sports cars up to their cliff-top mansion. I found this very relatable as a 10-year-old. The Harts became my template for a happy marriage. And now my wife and I are banned from driving and always looking for crimes.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
Buck Rogers was a man from the late 1970s who found himself in a post-apocalyptic far future version of the 1970s. He was accompanied in his adventures by Twiki, a robot with a speech impediment, a talking iPad called Dr Theopolis and a woman with the very futuristic name of "Wilma". In the future there were synthetic fibres and feather-cuts but the people had forgotten how to, in Buck's words, "boogie". So then Buck arrived with his raw sexuality, helmet-hair and skin-clinging onesie and, in the pilot episode, started disco dancing (seriously).

“It’s called ‘getting down,’” he explained to Princess Ardala of the evil Draconians who wished to both make him her consort (understandable, he was a hunk) and conquer the Earth (less understandable, it was a dump). “Does it frighten you?” he added.

It did, very much.